Quantum Theory Review

It's not a theory, it's a fact: this game sucks.

Quantum Theory is a game whose design is dated despite being a week old. It's a game that feels like it didn't understand what it wanted to be, mashing third-person cover-based shooting with crappy platforming, awful, dated boss fight designs, and a story that's so poorly-constructed that you can't help but laugh at it. If you want to design games for a living, you should definitely check out Quantum Theory, it's a pretty apt example of what not to do.

Quantum Theory is, at its core, a shoddy rip-off of Epic Games' Gears of War. You control a character in third-person, guiding them from cover to cover in an effort to take out enemies who are doing the same. It even controls just like Gears, using the same button to reload (though failing to implement that franchise's beloved Active Reload system), the same button to roll, and the same button to run and take cover. It's trying to be the quintessential "stop-and-pop" game, with fights that should be designed to challenge the player to take advantage of the environment and time their shots, using precision over sheer force.

The big problem is that only some of the fights work this way in Quantum Theory. For every encounter designed with lots of cover and flanking opportunities, you'll have to smash your way through a few others where you given few, if any, cover opportunities at all. This results in fights where the player has to run around like a maniac, shooting from the hip while rolling around and hoping not to die. This would be fine, in fact, if the game was designed with a character that was lithe and controlled well for this type of scenario -- but it's not. Players have to suffer through rolling around a gigantic meatball of a character, hoping not to suck up bullets and praying that they can find a piece of cover to play the game the way it's meant to be played. Picture playing Gears of War in several battles where you're relying on rolling around like an idiot punching people to death and you've got a pretty good idea of how a lot of Quantum Theory's more frustrating fights play out.

Even when Quantum Theory provides the player with an interestingly designed battlefield -- you know, where you have lots of places to take cover in a cover-based shooter -- the fights are often boring, drawn out and anger-inducing. At several points it feels like the designers artificially extend the length of the game by throwing wave after wave of enemies at the player. The idiotic enemy A.I. and very few enemy types don't help either, with battles very rarely presenting any sort of challenge as long as you have a piece of cover to hide behind. Seriously, enemies in the game do one of two things: run straight at you or hide behind the same piece of cover and poke out rhythmically, making them easy enough to pick off. If the enemies get close to you, however, be prepared to struggle with the game's terrible cover mechanic, where you have to actively disengage yourself from cover with a button press rather than just intuitively pulling yourself away with a quick movement of the stick.

The only time that Quantum Theory gets truly challenging is when it presents you with situations where it kills you instantly when you screw up. Whether it's boss fights where one false step will get your ass killed, or platforming portions of the game where you have to use the character's horrifically awkward jumps to make precise leaps, Quantum Theory finds ample opportunities to kill you without mercy. Awesome, I know. The worst part, though, is that it often places you in be-perfect-or-die situations at times where checkpoints are nowhere to be found, leaving you to slog through painful sections repeatedly until you finally get that one awful part just right.

Sometimes you can justify playing through a crappy game because it has a redeeming quality like an awesome story, but Quantum Theory utterly fails in this regard. The storyline has something to do with human evolution, but beyond that I think my mind has blanked a lot of it out as a means of coping. The writing is awful, the lead character isn't at all likeable, and the game's ending isn't at all satisfying. I can't say that the ending left me feeling robbed, though, because the game tells its story so confusingly and awkwardly that I never had a good idea as to how it should have ended.

Quantum Theory has a multiplayer component for those who are interested, but you better talk your friends into picking it up with you. At the time of this review the leaderboards consist of only a few hundred players, and my attempts at finding a game resulted in a total of one lobby with one other player who eventually just left because there was no one else to play with. If you're stuck with Quantum Theory I'm pretty sure you could have more fun playing "multiplayer" by throwing it out of a moving vehicle together than by spending precious moments of your life in the game's online ghost town.

The Verdict

Quantum Theory is a functional game, but that's about the only thing that can be said about it. If this is what the developers at Tecmo-Koei think western gamers want out of a shooter then we need an intervention. Its uninspired level design, terrible shooting, and frustrating instant-kill portions make this a game that I simply couldn’t recommend to anyone at anytime. You only get one life to live, and Quantum Theory isn’t worth a moment of it.